I think its awesome that many people find ways to solve these with different rules making the challenge harder. As a person that is a couple of years into programming, I am also going in with som personal rules. I try to solve this years AoC with as few if statements as possible using only Pythons standard library. I have completed day 1 to day 4 with 0 if statements. https://github.com/emilbratt/adventofcode/tree/main/2021 Having said that, I don`t agree on changing the input files as I see many people do. I don`t know if it is feasible to solve in SQL without doing so, so take it with a grain of salt. For instance, take day 4s input. I`ve seen many split the random numbers into one file and the bingo board numbers into another. I`ve also seen people using their IDE to remove all leading white space for the single digits for the bingo board numbers to make it easier to parse programmatically. In my opinion, this defeats a major purpose of the challenge. It is in fact a programming challenge.